We are in need of a experienced software developer well versed in Perl and web based technologies. Looking for a motivated individual who has experience building scalable web application in Perl and MySQL, and has a familiarity with developing in Unix/Linux environments.

One day last year at the Watchung Deli, at the request of a student from a nearby school, Ben Gualano piled mac-and-cheese onto a chicken cutlet sub with barbecue sauce and bacon, squeezed it shut somehow, and the Benny Mac was born… It’s a full-body experience — like a mud bath, but with extra ooze. One taster said afterward, “There was bacon in there?”

You may remember that I’m a sandwich fan. For dinner last night, I had a surprisingly good turkey sandwich of my own making (the little bit of onion and the pepper was the secret) and have made friends with a particularly good meatball hero and a banh mi near the office. My present sandwich life is entirely satisfying.

Two new books by bloggers out today: Heather Armstrong’s first book, a compilation called Things I Learned About My Dad, and Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother, a book on “techno-geek rebellion” for teens. At the moment, Dooce is winning the battle at Amazon; Little Brother’s sales rank is #501 while Things I Learned is a startling #38.

Free Richard Dawkins! (That’s free as in lecture, not free as in spring from jail.) Each year in honor of Harvey David Preisler, a lecture is given and this year’s will be delivered by Richard Dawkins on May 3 @ 9am at The New York Academy of Sciences.

The lecture is entitled “The Purpose of Purpose,” and Professor Dawkins will make himself available for a question/answer period afterward. If you are in the New York City area (or can be on Saturday), I urge you to attend.

As noted the lecture is free; all you need to do is RSVP in the comments of this thread.

(Today is Ben Fry day on kottke.org. Apparently.) All Streets is a map of the US with all 26 million roads displayed on it. The best part is that features like mountains and rivers emerge naturally from the road system.

No other features (such as outlines or geographic features) have been added to this image, however they emerge as roads avoid mountains, and sparse areas convey low population. The pace of progress is seen in the midwest where suburban areas are punctuated by square blocks of area that are still farm land.

Ben Fry has updated his salary vs. performance chart for the 2008 MLB season that compares team payrolls with winning percentage. The entire payroll of the Florida Marlins appears to be less than what Jason Giambi and A-Rod *each* made last year.

In the late ’90s, pop-culture historian Bill Geerhart had a little too much time on his hands and a surfeit of stamps. So, for his own entertainment, the then-unemployed thirtysomething launched a letter-writing campaign to some of the most powerful and infamous figures in the country, posing as a curious 10-year-old named Billy.

He wrote to Charles Manson, Ted Kacynzski, and Dick Cheney, among others…and they wrote back. Richard Ramirez, aka the Night Stalker, wrote back on his own personalized letterhead. (thx, andrew)

That’s what the parents of a dead 11-year-old girl said when told the medical examiner was to do an autopsy on her. The girl died from untreated diabetes while her parents, convinced she was under “spiritual attack”, prayed for her instead of taking her to the doctor. They face up to 25 years in prison and probably zero guilt because it was all God’s plan.

As a student and trainee journalist, I managed to drive my bright red one thousands of miles around the continent and once even to Morocco without a breakdown. The main drawback was sunburn from motoring with the cloth roof rolled back. There was so much wind you didn’t feel the rays.

For her Mended Spiderweb project, Nina Katchadourian found spiderwebs in need of repair and fixed them with a needle and thread.

All of the patches were made by inserting segments one at a time directly into the web. Sometimes the thread was starched, which made it stiffer and easier to work with. The short threads were held in place by the stickiness of the spider web itself; longer threads were reinforced by dipping the tips into white glue. I fixed the holes in the web until it was fully repaired, or until it could no longer bear the weight of the thread.

The spiders didn’t think much of her handiwork:

The morning after the first patch job, I discovered a pile of red threads lying on the ground below the web. At first I assumed the wind had blown them out; on closer inspection it became clear that the spider had repaired the web to perfect condition using its own methods, throwing the threads out in the process. My repairs were always rejected by the spider and discarded, usually during the course of the night, even in webs which looked abandoned.

At the Web 2.0 conference, Clay Shirky gave a talk called Gin, Television, and Social Surplus. In it, he argues that the “social surplus” soaked up in the latter half of the 20th century by television is now being put to better use on the internet.

For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before—free time. And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV. We did that for decades. We watched I Love Lucy. We watched Gilligan’s Island. We watch Malcolm in the Middle. We watch Desperate Housewives. Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat.

But maybe it’s possible that the internet is a slightly more sophisticated (or slightly more cognitive) cognitive heat sink?

To be honest, I was a little disappointed in Standard Operating Procedure…but the fault is my own, not the film’s. My expectation was that the film would start with the photos of Abu Ghraib & misdeeds of the lower ranking soldiers and then move up the chain of command, both militarily and thematically speaking, to explore the issues of truth in photography and culpability. To Morris’ credit, he didn’t do that. It’s too easy these days to attempt arguments about Iraq or the Bush Administration that connect too many dots with too little evidence…essentially propaganda that sings to the choir.

SOP has a surprisingly small depth of field; it’s the story of those infamous photos, the people who took & appeared in them, and what they have to say about the photos & the actions they purport to show. And in that, the movie succeeds. Morris leaves plenty of negative space into which the audience can insert their own questions about what the photographs ultimately depict and who’s responsible in the end.

Incidentally, Morris generated a bit of controversy recently when he admitted that he’d paid some of the interviewees in SOP. The criticism of this practice is that “the credibility of interviewees diminishes when money changes hands and that these people will provide the answers they think are desired rather than the truth”. That is a concern but no more so than every other reason for being untruthful, including not telling the truth out of spite for lack of payment. People have so many better reasons to lie than money.

The Coolidge Effect is a phenomenon whereby males exhibit high sexual performance given the introduction of new willing females.

It earned its name many years ago when President Coolidge and his wife were touring a farm. While the President was elsewhere, the farmer proudly showed Mrs. Coolidge a rooster that “could copulate with hens all day long, day after day.” Mrs. Coolidge coyly suggested that the farmer tell that to Mr. Coolidge, which he did.

The President thought for a moment and then inquired, “With the same hen?”

14. The past is heritage: we study it to form or enforce national, ethnic, religious or personal identity, or to combat attempts to destroy heritage. Gertrude Himmelfarb, The De-Moralization of Society.

This season, baseball managers are being a bit more experimental in how they construct their batting and pitching lineups. For instance, the Yankees, Giants, and Dodgers started relief pitchers in games that they suspected might be shortened by rain in order to save the scheduled starter for the next game. The Braves shifted their pitcher to the outfield for one at-bat then brought him back to the mound for the next one.

The article is also notable for this quote from an Angels spokesperson, who said that Angels star Vladimir Guerrero is “somebody who’s not affected by things”. !!

I’m debuting a new feature on kottke.org. On (some? most? all?) Fridays, I’ll wrap up the week with a list of interesting facts I’ve found that don’t really warrant their own posts for whatever reason. I hope you find it useful. Suggestions for next week’s list are welcome via email.

On a Spring morning Brad showed up to homeroom with the crazed look of inspiration on his face. He erupted into babble and I sensed that he’d been waiting many hours to unload his revelation upon me. It was something about Starcade, and a club, and titles and duties, and other foreign concepts. I patronizingly agreed to his wishes and I even signed something. It was a letter…

6 Feb 2001: We ate some dinner and watched the last part of “City of Angels”. Shep did his best to explain to Yuri and Sergei what the phrase “chick flick” means.

24 Feb 2001 We put some chow and the DVD player in the Soyuz and close the hatch about 0530. It takes 2 orbits to get the first set of hooks off and the docking tunnel pressure checked. We get the “Austin Powers” sequel in while all this is taking place. (Maybe a Soyuz first here).

Sergei notices that the Russian PCS laptop has locked up. He tries to reboot, but the Sun application software won’t load. Lots of messages on the screen noting data errors. Sergei thinks that it may be the hard drive. He boots up windows to see if the windows partition runs OK—it does. So at least some of the hardware is functional.

I’ve got Will Smith action hero fatigue, but HOLY CRAP does Hancock look awesome. I am into apathetic superheroes. There’s a second trailer available on YouTube…and its quality is surprisingly good. (You can tell I don’t make it out to the movies a lot these days…the first trailer has been out since December.)

Honestly I was getting a little burned out on Errol Morris. I’ve been reading his Times blog, reading and listening to interviews with him about Standard Operating Procedure, and went to see him at the Apple Store last night. (I was most intrigued by his observation that photographs both reveal and conceal at the same time.) But this (relatively) short interview with him on the AV Club site is worth reading and got me unburned out. One of the many choice quotes:

I wish they’d just get it over with and make [Iraq] the 51st state, because I think it’s the perfect red state: religious fundamentalists, lots of weaponry. How could you go wrong? We’re already spending a significant fraction of our gross national product on the infrastructure; such as it is, on Iraq. Make it the 51st state and get it over with.

It seems like there’s been plenty of instances in which big guys [i.e. Bush, Cheney, etc.] could have and should have been held accountable. Yet it’s not as if they’ve slipped a noose. It’s as if they deny that there’s even a noose to be slipped.

And Morris replies:

That’s what’s so bizarre. You know, there are smoking guns everywhere, and people are being constantly hit over the head with smoking guns, and people simply don’t act on them.

For me, this is the central mystery of the Bush administration. There has been demonstrable legal wrongdoing on the part of this administration and through some magical process, they’ve charmed the country and managed to sidestep not only legal action (including impeachment) but even the threat of legal action and — this is the best part — get fucking reelected in the process. With Bush’s disapproval rating at an all-time high (for any President since Gallup began polling), it’s not like people aren’t aware and the 2006 elections clearly show the country’s disapproval with Bush et al. Maddening and fascinating at the same time.

He was TFL’s first ever sous chef and to this day I have never seen any one person work so many hours. (He, Thomas & Laura all put in 17-19 hour days, 7 days a week.) Everyone knows The French Laundry is an amazing restaurant, but few know why. It’s easy to blame or praise one person, but the truth is that it takes a village.

“Water,” Batali says. “Water is huge. It’s probably one of California’s biggest problems with pizza.” Water binds the dough’s few ingredients. Nearly every chemical reaction that produces flavor occurs in water, says Chris Loss, a food scientist with the Culinary Institute of America. “So, naturally, the minerals and chemicals in it will affect every aspect of the way something tastes.”

There are a lot of variables for such a simple food. But these 3 FAR outweigh the others:

1. High Heat2. Kneading Technique3. The kind of yeast culture or “starter” used along with proper fermentation technique

All other factors pale in comparison to these 3. I know that people fuss over the brand of flour, the kind of sauce, etc. I discuss all of these things, but if you don’t have the 3 fundamentals above handled, you will be limited.

The stylistic arena of text and images is so exponentially more vast, and so much easier to negotiate a rewarding path through, it’s hard not to think of the [podcasting] format as broken, a dead end. Perhaps that’s why many come and go so quickly.

…Dean Allen lists some of his favorite podcasts. Many of which I’d immediately subscribe to except that I don’t exercise, drive, or cook. (I will also add that I am so happy to have Textism back in my life. It’s the perfect up-yours to the Web 2.0 hype machinery/chicanery.)

Jared Diamond wrote a fascinating article in last week’s New Yorker about vengeance. On one of his trips to Papua New Guinea, he met a man named Daniel who had been responsible for “organizing the revenge” against the man who killed his paternal uncle Soll. (Incidentally, Soll’s killer was also an uncle of Daniel’s.)

Among Highland clans, each killing demands a revenge killing, so that a war goes on and on, unless political considerations cause it to be settled, or unless one clan is wiped out or flees. When I asked Daniel how the war that claimed his uncle’s life began, he answered, “The original cause of the wars between the Handa and Ombal clans was a pig that ruined a garden.” Surprisingly to outsiders, most Highland wars start ostensibly as a dispute over either pigs or women. Anthropologists debate whether the wars really arise from some deeper lying ultimate cause, such as land or population pressure, but the participants, when they are asked to name a cause, usually point to a woman or a pig.

The process of vengeance is very important to the people living in this region of New Guinea; people there speak openly of revenge killings as Americans might speak of friendships and family. Diamond argues that the New Guineans’ everyday open embrace of such a strong emotion is not necessarily a bad thing and that modern society can circumvent people’s need for vengeance, resulting in feelings of dissatisfaction that can create unbalanced emotional lives. At the end of WWII, Diamond’s father-in-law had a chance to take his revenge on someone who had killed his mother, sister, and niece but was persuaded to turn the man over to the new Polish government for punishment. The man was never charged with the crime and Diamond’s father-in-law was never the same.

One day, he took out a sheaf of photographs and showed [his daughter] Marie a picture of three shallow excavations in a forest: the photo that he had taken of the graves of his mother, sister, and niece. Then, for the first time, he told Marie the story of how he discovered what had happened to them, and of his release of their killer. Once, when he was about ninety years old, he recounted the story to Marie and me together. I recall his talking in an emotionally flat, distant, storytelling way, as if he no longer attached feelings to the story. In fact, his distanced manner must have been a tightly controlled act, a way of preserving his sanity while living with his memories.

The forum’s members go on to speculate that the mushrooms were possibly enlarged by Papa Smurf’s magic, or perhaps just regular tiny houses built by Handy Smurf and camoflauged as mushrooms to trick outsiders.

With images by Sabine Haubitz and Stefanie Zoche of Haubitz+Zoche, the show looks at “the concrete skeletons of five-star hotel complexes” abandoned on Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. They are resorts that never quite happened, then, with names like Sultan’s Palace and the Magic Life Imperial. This makes them “monuments to failed investment.”

1. The number of Americans in prison remains an underreported scandal, as well as the conditions they face.

7. The American culture of individual freedom is closely linked to the prevalence of mental illness and gun-based violence in this country. We can’t seem to get only the brighter side of non-conformity.

Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, said on Tuesday that he had asked Mr. Flórez weeks ago whether he would be prepared to repeat the aria, if the audience demanded. Mr. Fl’orez had already done so at other houses, including the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, where last year he became the first to violate an encore ban since 1933.

Mr. Flórez agreed to Mr. Gelb’s request, and the orchestra and chorus were warned. A system was established. Mr. Gelb kept an open line on the phone in his box to the stage manager. After the explosive reaction he gave the stage manager the go-ahead. The manager activated a podium light for the conductor, Marco Armiliato. Mr. Armiliato held out a questioning two fingers to Mr. Flórez. “He just smiled, and that means ‘Yes,’ ” the conductor said.

The researchers found 56% of women with the highest energy intake around the time of conception had boys, compared to just 45% among women with the lowest energy intake. The average calorie intake for women who had sons was 2,413 a day, compared to 2,283 calories a day for women who had girls. Women who had sons were also more likely to have eaten a higher quantity and wider range of nutrients, including potassium, calcium and vitamins C, E and B12. They were also more likely to have eaten breakfast cereals.

The evolutionary guess is that when times are lean, a daughter will more consistently yield descendants than a son. (thx, meg)

Golden Eagles can be up to three feet long with a wingspan of over 7 feet. Here’s a video of a Golden Eagle hunting for food, a process that involves throwing live goats off of cliffs and then scavenging the carcass. If you’re at all sensitive about seeing animals die, you really shouldn’t watch this. For everyone else, the only way this could be more fascinating is if David Attenborough were narrating. (via waxy)

The video is a condensed time lapse of screenshots over a several month period. Total physical drawing time is close to 40 hours and I’d add an equal amount of time for concept time and readying the print. A screenshot was taken every 5 seconds, which actually results in a full 18 minute video.

After seeing Ferro’s commercials, Kubrick hired him to direct the advertising trailers and teasers for Dr. Strangelove and convinced him to resettle in London (Kubrick’s base of operations until he died there in March 1999). Ferro was inclined to be peripatetic anyway, and ever anxious to bypass already completed challenges he agreed to pull up stakes on the chance that he would get to direct a few British TV commercials, which he did. The black and white spot that Ferro designed for Dr. Strangelove employed his quick-cut technique — using as many as 125 separate images in a minute — to convey both the dark humor and the political immediacy of the film. At something akin to stroboscopic speed words and images flew across the screen to the accompaniment of loud sound effects and snippets of ironic dialog. At a time when the bomb loomed so large in the US public’s fears (remember Barry Goldwater ran for President promising to nuke China), and the polarization of left and right — east and west — was at its zenith, Ferro’s commercial was not only the boldest and most hypnotic graphic on TV, it was a sly subversive statement.

Ferro worked with Kubrick on the iconic and fantastic main titles for the film as well.

Kubrick wanted to film it all using small airplane models (doubtless prefiguring his classic space ship ballet in 2001: A Space Odyssey). Ferro dissuaded him and located the official stock footage that they used instead. Ferro further conceived the idea to fill the entire screen with lettering (which incidentally had never been done before), requiring the setting of credits at different sizes and weights, which potentially ran counter to legal contractual obligations. But Kubrick supported it regardless. On the other hand, Ferro was prepared to have the titles refined by a lettering artist, but Kubrick correctly felt that the rough hewn quality of the hand-drawn comp was more effective. So he carefully lettered the entire thing himself with a thin pen. Yet only after the film was released did he notice that one word was misspelled: “base on” instead of “based on”. Ooops!

If you want that hand-lettered look for yourself, Pablo Skinny is a font by Fargoboy that closely duplicates Ferro’s handwriting.

Ferro went on to make several well-known movie title sequences, including those for Bullitt and the original The Thomas Crown Affair but not Napoleon Dynamite. He collaborated with Kubrick once again on the trailer for A Clockwork Orange, another classic.

Update: According to this Wikipedia article, the work of Canadian avant-garde filmmaker Arthur Lipsett caught the eye of Stanley Kubrick after an Oscar nomination for his short film, Very Nice, Very Nice and, more importantly for our business here, that Kubrick directed the Strangelove trailer himself in Lipsett’s style after Lipsett refused to work with Kubrick on it:

Stanley Kubrick was one of Lipsett’s fans, and asked him to create a trailer for his upcoming movie Dr. Strangelove. Lipsett declined Kubrick’s offer. Kubrick went on to direct the trailer himself; however, Lipsett’s influence on Kubrick is clearly visible when watching the trailer.

The two are stylistically similar for sure, but Ferro is credited with having designed the main title sequence (according to the titles themselves). That passage doesn’t appear to have been derived from any particular source, so I looked for something more definitive. From a 1986 article by Lois Siegel

After his Academy Award nomination, he received a letter from British filmmaker Stanley Kubrick. The typewritten letter said, “I’m interested in having a trailer done for Dr. Strangelove.” Kubrick regarded Lipsett’s work as a landmark in cinema — a breakthrough. He was interested in involving Lipsett. This didn’t happen, but the actual trailer did reflect Lipsett’s style in Very Nice, Very Nice.

Kubrick described Very Nice, Very Nice (1961) as “one of the most imaginative and brilliant uses of the movie screen and soundtrack that I have ever seen.” Kubrick was so enthused with the film he invited Lipsett to create a trailer for Dr. Strangelove (Stanley Kubrick, 1965) an offer Lipsett refused. Stanley Kubrick, letter to Arthur Lipsett, Arthur Lipsett Collection, Cinematheque québécoise Archives, Montreal, May 31, 1962.

It’s not clear what the connection is between Lipsett’s work and the trailer that Ferro ended up producing for Strangelove, but several sources (including Heller) say that Ferro developed his quick-cut style directing commercials in the 1950s, work that would predate that of Lipsett.

Lipsett more clearly influenced the work of another prominent filmmaker, George Lucas. Lucas found inspiration in Lipsett’s 21-87 in making THX-1138 and borrowed the concept of “the Force” for the Star Wars movies. Lucas’ films are littered with references to Lipsett’s film; e.g. Princess Leia’s cell in Star Wars was in cell #2187. (thx, gordon)

In his current training, he said, he does exercises every morning in which he breathes for no more than 12 minutes over the course of an hour, and he sleeps in a hypoxic tent in his Manhattan apartment that simulates the thin air at 15,000 feet above sea level.

He has been concentrating on lowering his oxygen consumption by slowing his metabolism, partly through diet (he fasted for 18 hours before the breath-hold in the pool) and partly through relaxation. In a test by Dr. Potkin, Mr. Blaine on command quickly lowered his heart rate by 25 percent.

“David seems to have a phenomenal ability, like Buddhist monks, to control his body,” Dr. Potkin said.

And I didn’t appreciate how much progress free divers and their coaches have made at pushing the limits of human endurance until Mr. Blaine put my time in perspective. “Houdini used to brag about going three and a half minutes underwater,” Mr. Blaine said. “Look at how easily you beat Houdini.”

MLB tracks every pitch thrown in a game using a system called PITCHf/x. You may have seen this system in action during televised games; it’s used to show the viewer where the pitch was located when it crossed the plate relative to the strike zone. On his baseball statistics blog, Josh Kalk takes these stats and lets you slice and dice them however you want.

One of the most interesting statistics measured is the break of a pitch…how much up-and-down and side-to-side motion a pitched ball goes through after leaving the pitcher’s hand. The break demonstrates why the knuckleball is such a difficult pitch to hit, particularly when used in conjunction with other pitch types. Here’s a graph showing the break on knuckleballer Tim Wakefield’s pitches so far this season:

The ball is all over the place…the hitter doesn’t know where it’s going. Compare that to the break on the three different pitches thrown by fellow Red Sox player Daisuke Matsuzaka:

Now take a look at the graphs on the player cards for Wakefield and Matsuzaka. Wakefield’s pitches also have a wider range of velocities…Matsuzaka’s pitches range in speed from about 77 to 95 mph while Wakefield’s pitches range from 65 to 95 mph. And the graphs don’t even account for the multiple breaks that a knuckleball can make during a single pitch. The uncertainties of speed and break of a knuckleballer’s pitches combine to create a lot of trouble for batters…they neither know where the ball’s going nor when it’s going to arrive. (thx, fred)

P.S. So why is Wakefield not as effective as many other major league pitchers (his career stats aren’t that impressive), none of whom throw the knuckleball? One guess is that sometimes the knuckleball doesn’t break and essentially becomes a 60-65 mph meatball right down the middle of the plate, a pitch any decent hitter can put anywhere he wants.

Update: I thought that Wakefield’s upper velocity range was a little high. I’m getting a lot of feedback saying that Wakefield’s fastball is in the low 80s, not the mid-90s. Looks like we’ve got some screwy data here.

Also, another reason why knuckleballers are of limited effectiveness: it’s difficult to throw a strike on command, which can be a problem when you’re behind in the count and you have to throw your 80 mph fastball for a strike. (thx, jonathan & steve)

Sen. Jim King, R-Jacksonville, said he had a set [of Truck Nutz] on one of his vehicles, which he described as “all pimped out.” They are no more than “an expression of truckliness,” he said, although he’d acceded to his wife’s request to take them off.

“I find it shocking we’d tell people with metallic testicles on their bumpers that this is a violation,” said Sen. Steve Geller, D-Hallandale. “There’s got to be better things for us to spend time debating.”

Finding the Moon when its slim crescent is still less than about 24 hours past the New Moon phase requires careful timing and planning, a challenging project even for experienced observers. In this sighting, only about 0.8 percent of the Moon’s disk appears illuminated.

At the same time, I don’t think the cooks look at me as a real community member. I’m not that cozy paternal figure. I’m always doing different things, and it creates this atmosphere where the cooks are on the balls of their feet. They’re thinking, Where’s he going next, what’s happening next? There’s a little bit of confusion. I think that’s good. It’s hard to articulate, because you think of the kitchen as very organized; and, like I said, the more control you have, the better. But a little bit of chaos creates tension. And that creates energy and passion, and it tends to make you season something the right way or reach for something that would add this, that, or the other thing.

The other chefs are Alice Waters, Grant Achatz, and Wylie Dufresne. The one thing they all talked about is the importance of open sight lines, both between the dining room and kitchen and among the chefs in the kitchen.

The flight was supposed be for stranded women and children but as soon as the plane landed in Da Nang, it was swamped by South Vietnamese soldiers attempting to flee the oncoming North Vietnamese forces.

There were 260 people aboard a plane which is designed to carry 105. The plane was overloaded by 20,000 pounds. The baggage compartments were loaded with people. Some of the problems during the flight included, the rear stairway remained partially extended for the entire flight, the main wheels would not retract, a hand grenade damage to one of the wings causing fuel loss, and the lower cargo doors were open. The plane had to fly at 10,000 feet because of lack of pressurization thus fuel consumption was three times greater than normal.

In the end, only 5 women and 2 or 3 children made it onboard. That’s some powerful journalism. (thx, brandon)

The idea for SA is to move beyond an increasingly commoditized blog publishing software business, and into adding advertising, design, implementation, development and site optimization services to bloggers and companies.

Clusterflock’s Deron Bauman did an interview with me the other day over IM and posted an edited transcript. This seems to be the bit that everyone is pulling from the interview so I will as well:

Other times, it’s not so fun running a visible site. Some people are determined to deliberately misunderstand much of what they encounter in life. Sometimes I have a hard time realizing that that’s their problem, not mine.

Few pitchers are able to throw the knuckler, giving those who can a cult-like status. It generally requires very large fingers. As Hall of Famer Willie Stargell explained it, “Throwing a knuckleball for a strike is like throwing a butterfly with hiccups across the street into your neighbor’s mailbox”.

Yankees third baseman Wade Boggs once used the knuckleball to retire the side in an inning during a rare appearance on the mound. When he’s got his stuff working, I love watching knuckleballer Tim Wakefield pitch.

Like the lost plays of Aeschylus that were written about but did not survive themselves, no known examples of the work of Wedgwood and his circle have ever been found. But Dr. Schaaf, in looking deeper into the leaf image, realized that these legendary lost images had something else in common: their creators were all part of the close social circle of the family of Henry Bright.

“The reason that I got so excited about this was that it was the most solid, indicative collection I’ve seen,” he said. “I’m fully prepared for ‘The Leaf’ to have been made by Henry Bright, or by his father, after the 1790s. But I’ve never seen a story that fits together so neatly.”

** A photogenic drawing is a precursor to the photograph and is created by placing an object on a piece of photosensitive paper and exposing it to light.

I missed this earlier this week: physicist John Wheeler has died at the age of 96. A snippet from the NY Times obituary:

At the same time, he returned to the questions that had animated Einstein and Bohr, about the nature of reality as revealed by the strange laws of quantum mechanics. The cornerstone of that revolution was the uncertainty principle, propounded by Werner Heisenberg in 1927, which seemed to put fundamental limits on what could be known about nature, declaring, for example, that it was impossible, even in theory, to know both the velocity and the position of a subatomic particle. Knowing one destroyed the ability to measure the other. As a result, until observed, subatomic particles and events existed in a sort of cloud of possibility that Dr. Wheeler sometimes referred to as “a smoky dragon.”

This kind of thinking frustrated Einstein, who once asked Dr. Wheeler if the Moon was still there when nobody looked at it.

Wheeler recognized that physics is about ideas and the language used to express those ideas, not just mathematics and experimentation. He coined and popularized several phrases during his long career, including black hole, wormhole, and quantum foam.

At my grocery store I could only find three examples: Land O’Lakes Butter, Morton Salt and Cracker Jacks. These packages each include a picture of the package itself and are often cited by writers discussing such pop-math-arcana as recursion, strange loops, self-similarity, and fractals. This particular phenomenon, known as the “Droste effect,” is named after a 1904 package of Droste brand cocoa. The mathematical interest in these packaging illustrations is their implied infinity. If the resolution of the printing process — (and the determination and eyesight of the illustrator) — were not limiting factors, it would go on forever. A package with in a package within a package… Like Russian dolls.

Sportswriters and pundits, on the other hand, are treating the MVP race with the gravitas of a presidential election. That’s because they make up the Electoral College. When they’re debating who’s going to win the award, they’re not really talking about who they think the best player is; they’re talking about whom they should pick as the best player. It’s the ultimate circle-jerk of sports-guy self-regard.

Stephen’s investigation combines historical detective work and a hands-on challenge. He travels to France and Germany on the trail of Johannes Gutenberg, the inventor of the printing press and early media entrepreneur. Along the way he discovers the lengths Gutenberg went to keep his project secret, explores the role of avaricious investors and unscrupulous competitors, and discovers why printing mattered so much in medieval Europe.

But to really understand the man and his machine, Stephen gets his hands dirty - assembling a team of craftsmen and helping them build a working replica of Gutenberg’s original press. He learns how to make paper the 15th-century way and works as an apprentice in a metal foundry in preparation for the experiment to put the replica press through its paces. Can Stephen’s modern-day team match the achievement of Gutenberg’s medieval craftsmen?

Here’s part one to get you started:

I haven’t had a chance to watch it yet, but it’s supposed to be really good. Oh, and if you’re thinking “who does this Fry bloke think he is going on about technology like he knows something about it”, you should check out his blog…he’s a top-notch tech blogger. (thx, dean)

While the preservation of food in the freezing temperatures and dry climate has been noted, bacterial decay still occurs. Besides, the World Monuments Watch describes it as one of the hundred most endangered sites in the world, and New Zealand’s Antarctic Heritage Trust (AHT) has been working in the last years to preserve it from corrosion.

These structures and the supplies contained within are almost 100 years old.

The story of a salvage team racing to save the Cougar Ace, a 55,000 ton cargo ship packed with Mazda cars valued at $103 million that nearly flipped when the ballast tanks on either side of the ship got out of balance. If the team succeeds, they get ~10% of the cargo’s value and If not, they don’t get paid…either way, someone might die.

Reed and Habib crawl along the tilted deck, periodically consulting a drawing of the ship’s internal compartments. They rap their knuckles on a piece of steel - this is the top of the low-side ballast tank. Trepte pulls out a drill and bores down. Suddenly, water erupts. The tank is already full and pressurized - water must be flowing in through a broken vent on the underwater side of the ship. It sprays furiously. They have unwittingly caused the worst thing possible: The deepest cargo hold is flooding.

In an instant, Trepte covers the hole with the tip of a finger and presses hard. The sound of gushing water abruptly stops, and the shouts and curses of the moment before echo through the hold. Salt water drips off Mazdas, and the panic the men all felt transforms into a contagious laugh.

Trepte is keeping the ship afloat with one finger.

The story includes links to video and journal entries from the salvage team.

Princeton Architectural Press is offering a most unusual publication called Materials Monthly. Each month or so, a small box arrives on your doorstep containing not just a printed magazine about architecturally interesting materials but samples of the materials themselves, including fabric swatches, tiles, wallpaper, glass, and steel. Dan Hill recently received his issue and has a nice review and unboxing.

Benoit Mandelbrot and Paola Antonelli talk about, among other things, fractals, self-similarity in architecture, algorithms that could specify the creation of entire cities, visual mathematics, and generalists.

This has been for me an extraordinary pleasure because it means a certain misuse of Euclid is dead. Now, of course, I think that Euclid is marvelous, he produced one of the masterpieces of the human mind. But it was not meant to be used as a textbook by millions of students century after century. It was meant for a very small community of mathematicians who were describing their works to one another. It’s a very complicated, very interesting book which I admire greatly. But to force beginners into a mathematics in this particular style was a decision taken by teachers and forced upon society. I don’t feel that Euclid is the way to start learning mathematics. Learning mathematics should begin by learning the geometry of mountains, of humans. In a certain sense, the geometry of…well, of Mother Nature, and also of buildings, of great architecture.

Me know. Me have problem. Me love cookies. Me tend to get out of control when me see cookies. Me know it not natural to react so strongly to cookies, but me have weakness. Me know me do wrong. Me know it isn’t normal. Me see disapproving looks. Me see stares. Me hurt inside.

- The vast majority of the recent album releases rated by Metacritic are in the “generally favorable reviews” category. A few are rated “universal acclaim” or “mixed or average reviews” and only one is “generally negative”. Compare that to the ratings for recently released movies, which are much lower on average. Do people demand higher quality from their music than movies? Or is so much music produced (compared to movies) that the only albums worth compiling reviews for are the good ones?

The newest version of Google Earth includes 3-D photorealistic buildings, sunlight (with shadows on those realistic 3-D buildings), and a Spiderman-esque swooping action. Here’s a “photo” I snapped of downtown San Francisco.

Manufactured Landscapes opens with an eight-minute tracking shot of a gigantic factory in China, the camera moving past row after row of workers assembling widgets until you feel like the factory floor circumnavigates the globe. The point of the shot, as with Edward Burtynsky’s photography, is to encourage the viewer to do some rudimentary mathematics about the scale of industry in the world:

eight minutes to move across one factory + look at all those employees + how many factories like this are there in China? = wow, that’s a lot of widgets

While it’s unfair to say that the movie goes downhill from there, the tracking shot packs such a punch that the rest of the film seemed lacking in comparison. It was the only shot in the film that really felt like the cinematic equivalent of Burtynsky’s photography…a long photograph, if you will.

Here’s the problem: “More Than a Feeling” is four minutes and 47 fucking seconds long. I don’t have time for that kind of nonsense. That’s, like, one-seventh of my recreation right there.

Don’t get me wrong, slugger. I love “More Than a Feeling.” Those who don’t are your basic a-holes. But it’s like: We get it. The riff, the handclaps, the 10,000 multi-tracked guitars-nice. But then there’s another verse and another chorus and infinity more solos and just a really ridiculous amount of balderdash.

The pig is Berkshire, from a small farm in upstate NY. It was slaughtered at a small family slaughterhouse nearby, on the Thursday before the class. So this pig had been dead for less than a week before being butchered.

Coming from five generations of Ku Klux Klan members, 58-year-old “Ms. Ruth” sews hoods and robes for Klan members seven days a week, blessing each one when it’s done. A red satin outfit for an Exalted Cyclops, the head of a local chapter, costs about $140. She uses the earnings to help care for her 40-year-old quadriplegic daughter, “Lilbit,” who was injured in a car accident 10 years ago.

Ampersand usage varies from language to language. In English and French text, the ampersand may be substituted for the words and and et, and both versions may be used in the same text. The German rule is to use the ampersand within formal or corporate titles made up of two separate names; according to present German composition rules, the ampersand may not be used in running text. In any language, the ampersand’s calligraphic qualities make it a compelling design element that can add visual appeal and personality to any page.

For weeks my boy had been begging for me to please leave him somewhere, anywhere, and let him try to figure out how to get home on his own. So on that sunny Sunday I gave him a subway map, a MetroCard, a $20 bill, and several quarters, just in case he had to make a call.

No, I did not give him a cell phone. Didn’t want to lose it. And no, I didn’t trail him, like a mommy private eye. I trusted him to figure out that he should take the Lexington Avenue subway down, and the 34th Street crosstown bus home. If he couldn’t do that, I trusted him to ask a stranger. And then I even trusted that stranger not to think, “Gee, I was about to catch my train home, but now I think I’ll abduct this adorable child instead.”

Upon telling the story to others, she encountered some resistance:

Half the people I’ve told this episode to now want to turn me in for child abuse. As if keeping kids under lock and key and helmet and cell phone and nanny and surveillance is the right way to rear kids. It’s not. It’s debilitating — for us and for them.

White has the security-camera videotape of his time in the McGraw-Hill elevator. He has watched it twice-it was recorded at forty times regular speed, which makes him look like a bug in a box. The most striking thing to him about the tape is that it includes split-screen footage from three other elevators, on which you can see men intermittently performing maintenance work. Apparently, they never wondered about the one he was in. (Eight McGraw-Hill security guards came and went while he was stranded there; nobody seems to have noticed him on the monitor.)

If you draw a tight oval around this figure, with a little bit of slack to account for body sway, clothing, and squeamishness, you get an area of 2.3 square feet, the body space that was used to determine the capacity of New York City subway cars and U.S. Army vehicles. Fruin defines an area of three square feet or less as the “touch zone”; seven square feet as the “no-touch zone”; and ten square feet as the “personal-comfort zone.” Edward Hall, who pioneered the study of proxemics, called the smallest range — less than eighteen inches between people — “intimate distance,” the point at which you can sense another person’s odor and temperature. As Fruin wrote, “Involuntary confrontation and contact at this distance is psychologically disturbing for many persons.”

The pictures of the accused are startling in the banality of the faces. (While the spelling of many of the names — April, Britney, Brittini, Cara, Kayla, Mercades, Stephen, Zachary bring to mind a revived Mouseketeers.) A number of the girls look surprisingly similar, but minus the prison garb, they could just as easily be reacting to a berating for poor schoolwork. The boys, who were posted as lookouts while the girls carried out the beating, look a little more ready for jail.

The pictures are fascinating in the narrow range of emotion they convey, from self-pity to sullenness, but to my mind all stop before genuine contriteness. (I’m reading this in, of course, but I have a hunch I’m right.) Yet there’s an all-American look to these kids that can only remind us how narrow the line is between good and evil.

Really, what lessons do the Superman comics teach? It says that mankind is full of dull, pointless weaklings and evildoers who can only be stopped by a white ubermensch from another planet, who didn’t work a day in his life in order to achieve his powers. Yeah, you could say he’s a symbol of “hope,” but not hope in human nature - hope in an all-powerful alien who saves the world daily so you don’t have to get off your butt and act like a moral person. What sort of message is that?

A loop would be a captured action or situation rather than a narrative, where the duration of the loop is set but the loop goes on forever so you can study the layers, the detail, the figure and the ground in the same way you can a photo. A bottled system not a short story. Think about all the tiny clips you’ve played again and again on the internet just to see one aspect, one moment, act out — a goal or a dramatic chipmunk. Not stories, but toy moments.

If you’d bought 3,298 shares of Apple stock in 1998, for $99,995, at $30.32 a share, it would now be worth $1,997,797. The stock has split twice, so you’d now have 13,192 shares at (as of last week) $151.44. Buy yourself an iPhone to celebrate!

“I would go into a store with a list in my Hermes Ulysse notebook and pile up scarves, shawls, bracelets, worth about $2,000. This made me seem a regular Hermes client,” Tonello told Reuters in a telephone interview. “Once I had that pile ready to buy at the last moment I’d ask for a Birkin and they would usually produce one of the back room. In 2005 I bought 130 Birkins in a three-month period — and you tell me there is a waiting list?”

The Birkin retails for thousands (and sometimes tens of thousands) of dollars and can be see here in situ, on the arms of celebrity millionaires. Lindsey Lohan looks like she can just about fit into hers. (via clusterflock)

I read a lot of news by surfing the Internet, as do many of my colleagues and friends, and I’ve always dreamed of a way to browse news based on geography. What’s happening in Paris today? What are the top headlines in Japan?

None of what follows is rocket science, and it’s not the place to look for thoughts on 2.0/3.0, social software, or urban informatics. That would be in the accounts of different projects. But if you’re interested in the honest craft of website work, almost deliberately old-fashioned ‘classical’ web design — and how to ally this with innovation in magazine publishing — the following should provide a decent account of several of the key decisions in this particular project.

Dan’s thoughtful approach should be required reading for anyone building media web sites.

His criticism shows a nearly unequaled grasp of film history and technique, and formidable intellectual range, but he rarely seems to be showing off. He’s just trying to tell you what he thinks, and to provoke some thought on your part about how movies work and what they can do.

First: the rules of the game are in equilibrium: that is, from the start, the diamond was made just the right size, the pitcher’s mound just the right distance from home plate, etc., and this makes possible the marvelous plays, such as the double play. The physical layout of the game is perfectly adjusted to the human skills it is meant to display and to call into graceful exercise. Whereas, basketball, e.g., is constantly (or was then) adjusting its rules to get them in balance.

Second: the game does not give unusual preference or advantage to special physical types, e.g., to tall men as in basketball. All sorts of abilities can find a place somewhere, the tall and the short etc. can enjoy the game together in different positions.

The comments are entertaining as well; the level of erudition is higher than most blog comment threads, but the insults and arguments are still there.

Reduced exercise, the adoption of western foods and an aging population have made Japanese men about 10 percent heavier than they were 30 years ago, ministry statistics show. Women are 6.4 percent fatter.

The ministry estimates that half of men over age 40 and 20 percent of women will be diagnosed with metabolic syndrome. For men, a key yardstick is whether they have a waistline wider than 85 centimeters (33.5 inches). Body mass, cholesterol, blood pressure, blood sugar and smoking will also be taken into account.

Sixteen songs in my library have been played 50 times or more. More than 70 songs have been played at least 35 times. I’m wondering where that lies on the scale of obsession…do I listen to my favorite songs more or less than normal? If you folks can be considered normal…. ;)

Slo-mo can be a mesmerizing revelation of the grace inherent in the ordinary.

Slo-mo was invented and patented in 1904 by an Austrian priest-turned-physicist named August Musger. And who was working in the patent office in Austria in 1904?

My fantasy now is that Albert Einstein — working in the Swiss patent office in Bern in 1904, when Musger patented slo-mo in (relatively) nearby Austria — might have become aware of Musger’s slow-motion patent (perhaps it even crossed his desk?) and that contemplation of slo-mo might have influenced Einstein’s thinking about the nonabsoluteness, the relativity, of time.

Whining should be telling you something. Whining is the white smoke in your tailpipe that lets you know you’re burning mental oil. It means you’re unconsciously devoting cycles to something that you can’t, won’t, or shouldn’t be spending time thinking about. Otherwise, why would it be bothering you, right? You’d be either extricated or done with it.

“No good book has ever been written that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand and stuck in,” says Hemingway. “That kind of symbol sticks out like raisins in raisin bread. Raisin bread is all right, but plain bread is better.” He opens two bottles of beer and continues: “I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things. The hardest thing is to make something really true and sometimes truer than true.”

I like the raisin bread analogy. Just make the plain bread good instead of trying to jazz up subpar bread with raisins. Good advice for writing and cooking. (via rodcorp)

This page generates names by combining the first and last names from the 1990 US Census, creating names that may or may not actually exist. If you’re tired of perusing gravestones for the names of your next novel’s characters, this looks like a good alternative.

It’s very frustrating to me that most people don’t know [that the Gin Blossoms are still together]. We’re still very fortunate that we have a career and that we can make a good living playing our music. And we’ve got thirty-something-thousand MySpace friends, which is a great number. But, you know, I hang out with these young bands, like this group from Pittsburgh called Punchline-they’re friends of mine-and they’ve got seventy-five thousand MySpace friends. What it works out to, basically, is however many MySpace friends you have: that’s about how many records you can sell-at least…on your own.

And so, right now, with the way things are changing-record stores across the country are closing, CD sales are down, digital downloads are up. You don’t necessarily need a record company to sell. We don’t need a record company to sell our music to those thirty thousand people. We can do it directly. And thirty thousand people are more than enough to support our records and to keep our career going.

President George W. Bush’s successor should renounce his monarchy. It betters the instruction of King George III, which provoked the Declaration of Independence.

Among other things, the 44th president of the United States should do the following promptly upon taking office: Transfer the impending trials of six “high-value” al-Qaida detainees before Spanish Inquisition-like military commissions to civilian courts; repudiate President Bush’s kidnappings, secret imprisonments, and maltreatments of suspected al-Qaida supporters abroad on his say-so alone-a page from Hobbes’ state of nature; denounce signing statements that declare the president’s intent to disregard provisions of bills he has signed into law because he disputes their constitutionality; and end the snobbish custom of former government Brahmins preening in their honorifics after leaving office. The Founding Fathers prohibited titles of nobility to encourage a nonhierarchical culture that honors equality before the law.

Unlike their low-end counterparts, high-end call girls are expected to supply some level of companionship, and often accompany clients to dinners or parties. Because a beautiful and intelligent woman inevitably has other job (and marriage) options, a very high wage is necessary to encourage them to forgo other opportunities, and risk arrest, disease and shame.

And escorts must spend a great deal maintaining their value without immediate compensation. Much time and money is spent on grooming: hair removal, expensive hair-cuts (one stylist I spoke to claims several of his clients are escorts, who spend at least $1,000 a month on extensions and colour) and regular exercise. Many women have had plastic surgery (particularly if they were once men) and maintain an expensive designer wardrobe. Frequent visits to the doctor are necessary to protect against sexually-transmitted diseases.

Star Trek statistics: just how likely are you to die if you beam down to the planet’s surface wearing a red shirt?

You don’t know about the Red Shirt Phenomenon? Well, as any die-hard Trekkie knows, if you are wearing a red shirt and beam to the planet with Captain Kirk, you’re gonna die. That’s the common thinking, but I decided to put this to the test. After all, I hadn’t seen any definitive proof; it’s just what people said.

At bottom, Primer is a movie about morals and ethics, about how science is able to accomplish extraordinary things without regard to their consequences. On the breathless (and terrific) DVD commentary track, Carruth calls Abe and Aaron “kids in a clubhouse” and mocks their habit of strutting around in crisp dress shirts and ties. As the film progresses, the sheer enormity of their creation throws their very human flaws into sharp relief; they reveal themselves to be untrustworthy, greedy, and often narrowly self-serving and diabolical in how they use the machine.

A list of “evil” human experiments, including the Stanford prison experiment (one of the milder examples) and the Nazi experiments on concentration camp prisoners. Heed the warning at the top of the page…this was a difficult list to read.

Update: I had to remove the link because there was a bunch of crappy, virus stuff. If you’re on a Mac, have popup blocking turned on, or have a strong constitution, you can click here to see the list.

The disease apparently altered circuits in their brains, changing the connections between the front and back parts and resulting in a torrent of creativity. “We used to think dementias hit the brain diffusely,” Dr. Miller said. “Nothing was anatomically specific. That is wrong. We now realize that when specific, dominant circuits are injured or disintegrate, they may release or disinhibit activity in other areas. In other words, if one part of the brain is compromised, another part can remodel and become stronger.”

Some of Adams’ work can be seen here…her portrait of pi contains a touch of synesthesia. (thx, cory)

I like the idea of a consolidated aesthetic totality; what you make looks like what you listen to, sounds like what you wear, and speaks like what you believe in. In simpler terms, my girlfriend might look like she’s in a band I’d listen to, my haircut looks like it belongs in the chair I’m sitting in, and the work I’m designing might be written about in a book that I would read. Even my cat has to figure in there somehow. It’s a meticulous thing to maintain, but probably comes from the fact that I’ve discovered mostly everything through music, whether it’s ideologies, writers, artists, designers, cultures, subcultures, or other music. So it’s easy to tie things back into your work, as long as you keep your eyes and ears open, and maintain a healthy dose of critical thought.

New York is a hypertextualized city. By 6 a.m., our commuters have smudged more words off their papers than most cities read all day. How to even begin identifying a canon? While reading, I plotted candidates along two mystical axes: one of all-around literary merit, and the other of “New Yorkitude” — the degree to which a book allows itself to obsess over the city. Robert Caro’s The Power Broker just about maxes out both axes; others perseverate so memorably on smaller aspects of city life that they had to be included.

The list includes Rem Koolhaas’ Delirious New York, Don DeLillo’s Great Jones Street, and Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities.

The parents will be talking about this for a long time… the kids even longer. My son was a pitcher on the Lugnuts. We had a long/tough season last year. Saturday made up for everything. I want to sincerely thank you for making Saturday so unbelievable. It was like a birthday, Christmas, and New Years Eve captured in a few amazing hours. Thanks a million for a once in a lifetime opportunity.

Reporter Jorge Just brings us the story of Improv Everywhere, a group of New York City pranksters who found an unknown band from Vermont called Ghosts of Pasha and decided to give them “The Best Gig Ever.” They studied the band’s music and then crowded the club, pretending to be hard core fans. They thought of it as a kind of gift. But for the band, it was kind of a nightmare.

For the first time since I started blogging in 2002, I’ve redesigned Waxy.org. Over the last six years, I’ve grown pretty sick of the old design but never found the time to rework it. Mostly, the changes are cosmetic. Cleaner design, new logo, bigger type, headlines, better iPhone support, and more space devoted to Waxy Links.

According to a poll of 109 historians, George W. Bush is the Worst. President. Ever, hobnobbing with the likes of Millard Fillmore, James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, and Franklin Pierce at the bottom of the barrel.

This marks a dramatic deterioration for Bush. Previously he wasn’t viewed in the most positive terms, but there was a consensus that he wasn’t the “worst of the worst” either. That was in the spring of 2004. In the meantime, Bush has established himself as the torture president, the basis for his invasion of Iraq has been exposed as a fraud, the Iraq War itself has gone disastrously, the nation’s network of alliances has faded, and the economy has gone into a tailspin-not to mention the bungled handling of relief for victims of hurricane Katrina. In 2004, only 12 percent of historians were ready to place Bush dead last.

That’s the most depressing paragraph I’ve read all day. And it doesn’t even address the Patriot Act and all the other civil liberties restrictions enacted with 9/11 as the excuse.

I required redemption. When I arrived home two weeks ago after work, I was informed by my wife that I’d forgotten our anniversary. Eep. To partially make up for my cliched gaffe, I put my efforts towards getting a reservation at Momofuku Ko…the notoriously hard-to-get-into Momofuku Ko.1 We’re big fans of the other two Momofukus, so I logged into their online reservation system and happened to get something for last Friday night.

But this isn’t a story about their reservation system; too many of those have been written already. Bottom line: the food is wonderful and should be the focus of any Ko tale. Two dishes in particular were the equal of any I’ve had at other more expensive restaurants. The first was a pea soup with the most tender langoustine. The second dish, the superstar of the restaurant, was a coddled egg with caviar, onion soubise, and tiny potato chips (photo). Didn’t want that one to end. And I didn’t even mention the shaved foie gras (with Reisling built right in!) or the English muffins amuse or the nice wine pairings.

1. I spent all of five minutes on a Saturday morning making the reservation on the Ko web site. It can be done.

2. Chang and co. are serious about the web site being the only way to get into the restaurant. As we were leaving after our meal, a friend of Chang’s and bona fide celebrity stopped in to say hi. After some chit chat, the fellow asked if he could get a reservation at Ko for the next evening. Chang laughed, apologized, and told him that he had to go through the web site. They’re not kidding around, folks. ↩

My wife is a bit of a statistics nut. A few years ago, she hooked herself up to a heart rate monitor during a playoff football game and graphed the results. Sometimes I think she does things just so she’s got an excuse to open up Excel. So I wasn’t really surprised when she showed me this graph yesterday afternoon:

That’s a record of Meg’s weight from when she got pregnant with Ollie to the present, 80 weeks of data in all…40 weeks with Ollie on the inside and 40 on the outside.

Charles Joseph Minard may get all the accolades for his graphic of Napolean’s march to Moscow, but for me, the above chart is the most beautiful ever created. When I look at it, I see Ollie. The graph is a portrait of him, as sure as this photo is. It’s also a record of an intense time for our family. I’m reminded of Meg, happy and pregnant but also struggling with her changing body. Trips we took, doctor visits, the growing belly and anticipation, the birth itself, and then falling off the cliff into the giddy, difficult unknown of new parenthood. And then you can see Meg slowly but surely getting back into shape while being a full-time stay-at-home mom (and managing an architecture project to boot), and achieving her goal of getting back to her pre-baby fitness level in a scant 8 months. You can’t really see it, but there’s a happy father and proud husband in there somewhere as well.

That’s a lot of emotional impact for a simple black and white line graph with few labels. Imagine if it were in color and isometric 3-D! ;)

I feel like I’ve posted this one before but the Google says no so….LUNCH is a blog written by a couple of NYC architects who believe in the sanctity, sanity, and satiety of the lunch break.

We believe leaving the office everyday for lunch is an invaluable ritual. In a time and city where people are constantly rushing around, trying to accomplish three tasks at once, taking a moment to have a civilized meal becomes even more vital. Eating at your desk while reading emails, surfing the world wide web, snarfing down a bland turkey sandwich from the deli down the street is NOT lunch.

A woonerf, which is surfaced with paving blocks to signal a pedestrian-priority zone, is, in effect, an outdoor living room, with furniture to encourage the social use of the street. Surprisingly, it results in drastically slower traffic, since the woonerf is a people-first zone and cars enter it more warily. “The idea is that people shall look each other in the eye and maneuver in respect of each other,” Mr. Gehl said.

Car patrol eliminated the neighborhood police officer. Police were pulled off neighborhood beats to fill cars. But motorized patrol — the cornerstone of urban policing — has no effect on crime rates, victimization, or public satisfaction. Lawrence Sherman was an early critic of telephone dispatch and motorized patrol, noted, “The rise of telephone dispatch transformed both the method and purpose of patrol. Instead of watching to prevent crime, motorized police patrol became a process of merely waiting to respond to crime.”

Officers traveling in high speeds in cars apart from pedestrian and living areas makes it difficult for them to look potential criminals in the eye. (thx, meg)

Ben Saunders had to break off his attempt at a speed record to the North Pole after only eight days because of an equipment failure. The bolts on his skis snapped.

Those few hours in the tent were some of the lowest of my life; I thought of all the people that had gone so far out of their way to make this expedition happen, of the weeks of intense preparation, the months of training and the years of experience, testing and perfecting everything from my diet to the design of the sledge. This expedition was the physical embodiment of one of the biggest and most audacious dreams I’ve ever had, and the whole thing hung from a giant chain that involved countless people, places, promises and pieces of equipment. It turned out on Friday morning that the weakest link of that entire chain was a pair of screws, each with a head the size of my little finger tip, and each snapped clean in half.

Other archaeologists agreed that the findings established more firmly than before the presence of people on the continent at least 1,000 years before the well-known Clovis people, previously thought to be the first Americans. Recent research at sites in Florida and Wisconsin also appears to support the earlier arrivals, and a campsite in Chile indicates migration deep into South America by 14,600 years ago.

The airplane on a conveyor belt question was just recently settled and we’re confronted with a related question: will a helicopter on a turntable take off? The image is short on details and likely a joke, but let’s assume that the turntable will match the speed of the helicopter’s rotor (and further that the rotor’s speed is measured relative to the helicopter and the turntable’s speed is relative to the ground, otherwise it doesn’t make much sense). Will the helicopter take off? Does it matter which way the turntable is spinning relative to the rotor? (thx, daniel)

The maps visually represent the rhythm and structure of Kerouac’s literary space, creating works that are not only gorgeous from the point of view of graphic design, but also exhibit scientific rigor and precision in their formulation: meticulous scouring the surface of the text, highlighting and noting sentence length, prosody and themes, Posavec’s approach to the text is not unlike that of a surveyor. And similarly, the act is near reverential in its approach and the results are stunning graphical displays of the nature of the subject. The literary organism, rhythm textures and sentence drawings are truly gorgeous pieces.

The sentence drawings are really worth checking out.

Update: Posavec’s analysis of Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction is available for sale at 20x200. Apropos!

After having to file multiple Netflix movies as “lost in the mail” I began to get suspicious that there was more than just a careless mailman at fault. So what better to do than point a video camera at the mailbox and try to catch a Netflix thief.

A week after dozens of people ransacked an Oregon home in response to a Craigslist ad offering its contents for free, police have arrested a couple for orchestrating the online hoax as part of a bid to cover up an earlier burglary at the property. Brandon and Amber Herbert were nabbed last night for allegedly posting the March 22 Craigslist ad, which claimed that the Jacksonville ranch’s owner had to leave town so suddenly that his belongings — which included a horse — were available for the taking.

Burn After Reading is an upcoming comedy film, set for a September 12, 2008 release, starring John Malkovich, George Clooney, Tilda Swinton, Frances McDormand and Brad Pitt, and made by Joel and Ethan Coen. According to the Coens the plot will focus on the world of the CIA, physical fitness in Washington, D.C., and internet dating. The film is the follow up to the Academy Award winning No Country For Old Men and has been described by Tilda Swinton as “…a kind of monster caper movie. All of us are monsters — like, true monsters. It’s ridiculous. It’s much lighter than ‘No Country for Old Men.’”

Rather than returning to their original proportions, the muscles of the steroid users who’d stopped taking the drug looked remarkably similar to those of the subjects who were still using. They also had larger muscle fibers and more growth-inducing “myonuclei” in their muscle cells than the nonsteroid users.

Dykstra last played in the majors in 1996, at age thirty-three. Improbably, he has since become a successful day trader, and he let me know that he owns both a Maybach (“the best car”) and a Gulfstream (“the best jet”).

But maybe not so improbably…Dykstra has a canny sense for business:

Dykstra chose car washes, he says, because of the automobile-centric culture in California, and because “it was a business that couldn’t be replaced by a computer chip.” He brought his own frustrated consumer experiences to bear in creating the business model, and eliminated many of the usual array of motor-oil choices-startup, high-mileage, various blends-from his inventory. “You get the shit out of the ground,” he said, referring to standard Castrol GTX, “or the shit made in the laboratory that’s the perfect lubricant” (Syntec). “Meaning, it’s either A or B. It’s not about the oil. It’s about the people. They got confused.” He stocked the places with baseball memorabilia and flat-screen TVs, and served free coffee (“the good kind”), so that customers would associate the experience with luxury rather than with cumbersome chores.

One of the characteristics of Dykstra the businessman is his constant use of baseball metaphors and comparisons. Here’s a listing from the article:

The Players Club, in contrast to the television installation, would be “major league,” he explained, and to that end he was assembling an editorial staff of “.300 hitters,” and lining up sponsors to match.

Dykstra’s business card gives an address for the “headquarters” of The Players Club, at 245 Park Avenue, which he describes as “big league-like, top five addresses in the world.”

Next, he took a call from a designer he wanted to hire for the magazine. “You worked for Esquire and In Style,” he said, delivering a pep talk. “That’s called the big leagues. It’s like in baseball. You can’t go above the major leagues. There’s not another league. We’re teeing it up high, dude.”

He quoted from Confucius, Dickens, and Billy Joel, and balanced straight stock picks (“Intel is the N.Y. Yankees of the chipmakers”) with musings about fatherhood and current events, like the war in Iraq, seldom passing up the opportunity to draw extended sports analogies.

“My approach in investing is much the same as my approach to hitting,” he wrote. “I would rather take a walk or single and reach first than shoot for a home run and strike out swinging.”

Dykstra hopes the magazine will help players recognize the importance of marriage and family. He drew three stick figures and named them Tom, Dick, and Harry. Above Tom, he drew a man and a woman-two parents. Dick got a father but no mother, and Harry the reverse. “Do you know the studies and what they’ve proven?” he asked. “You should look that up, dude. Like, bad things. It’s like the one-one count.” The one-one count is another of Dykstra’s baseball metaphors for life, meant to illustrate that some moments, and the choices they bring, are more fateful than others (i.e., the next pitch makes all the difference), or, in this case, that circumstances set in motion during the early stages of development are difficult to overcome later on. If a batter falls behind, one ball and two strikes, he’s in a hole from which, the statistics augur, he will not recover, even if he is Barry Bonds; and if he gets ahead, to two balls and one strike, he wrests control from the pitcher and takes charge of his own destiny. Having two parents puts you in control of life’s count, and enables you to become a .300 hitter.

The 46-year-old has no more than $50,000 of assets and between $10 million and $50 million of liabilities, according to a petition filed Tuesday with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in the Central District of California.

Dykstra’s filing comes in the wake of more than 20 lawsuits he faces tied to his activities as a financial entrepreneur, including The Players Club, a glossy magazine for athletes he had helped launch in 2008.

Critics argue that the use of re-enactments suggest a callous disregard on the part of a filmmaker for what is true. I don’t agree. Some re-enactments serve the truth, others subvert it. There is no mode of expression, no technique of production that will instantly produce truth or falsehood. There is no veritas lens — no lens that provides a “truthful” picture of events. There is cinema verite and kino pravda but no cinematic truth.

And then:

Is the problem that we have an unfettered capacity for credulity, for false belief, and hence, we feel the need to protect ourselves from ourselves? If seeing is believing, then we better be damn careful about what we show people, including ourselves — because, regardless of what it is — we are likely to uncritically believe it.

Review of Clerks, 14 years after it was released. Verdict: it doesn’t hold up that well.

I don’t think I laughed more than a couple of times. And for the past 14 years, all I could remember about the film was the pick-up hockey game on the roof and the big punchline about Dante’s ex-girlfriend’s encounter in the bathroom. In the years that have followed, the cult of Kevin Smith has waxed and waned but mostly endured, spinning off into comic books, diaries, and concert appearances, several well-trafficked websites (and many other fan sites), and other assorted merchandise and pop-cultural flotsam.

I’ve never understood why Clerks was so well-regarded. Actually, now that I think about it, despite an affection for Mallrats shared by almost no one with any sense, I don’t like any of Smith’s movies but I do like Smith and the way that he goes about making his films…if that makes any sense at all. (Ok, Chasing Amy was alright and Jersey Girl was underrated.)

Frank Bruni, the food critic for the NY Times, wrote yesterday about the difficulty of getting a reservation at David Chang’s new Momofuku Ko restaurant. Ko’s online reservation system is the *only* way of procuring a seat at the tiny Manhattan restaurant…no walk-ins, no friends of the chef or celebs getting preferential treatment. It works more or less like Ticketmaster’s online ticketing: you select the number of guests, it shows you the available reservation times (if any), you click on a time, and if that time is still available when you click it, only then does the system hold your choice while you fill in some information.

It’s a simple system; seats for dinner are released on the site a week in advance at 10am each day and the people that click on their preferred times first get the reservations. Ko takes only 32 reservations each night and the restaurant is one of the hottest in town, which means that all the reservations are gone each day in seconds…sometimes in 2 or 3 seconds. Just like Radiohead tickets on Ticketmaster.

Except that diners are not used to this sort of thing. One of Bruni’s readers got irritated that he got through to the pick-a-time screen but then when he clicked on his preferred time was told that the reservation was already gone. Someone had beaten him to the punch. So he emailed the restaurant for an explanation. The exchange between the restaurant and the snubbed patron should be familiar with anyone who has done web development for clients or any kind of tech support.

In a nutshell, the would-be patron said (and I’m paraphrasing here), “your system is unfair and broken,” and the folks at Ko replied, “sorry, that’s how the internet works”. The comments on the post are both fascinating and disappointing, with many people attempting to debunk Ko’s seemingly lame excuse of, well, that’s how the internet works. Except that’s pretty much the right answer…although it’s clearer to say that that’s how a web server communicates with a web browser (and even that is a bit imprecise). When the pick-a-time page is downloaded by a particular browser, it’s based on the information the web server had when it sent the page out. The page sits unchanged on your computer — it doesn’t know anything about how many reservations the web server has left to dole out — until the person clicks on a time. An anonymous commenter in Bruni’s thread nails the choice that a web developer has to face in this instance:

This is a multi-user concurrency problem that all sites with limited inventory and a high demand (users all clicking the button all at the same time) have to deal with. It’s not an easy problem to solve.

The easier method (which the Ko site has chosen) is to not “lock” a reservation slot until the very end. You submit your party size and the system looks for available slots that it knows about. It shows you the calendar page, with the available slots it knows about (if any). This doesn’t update in real time because they haven’t implemented it to know about the current state of inventory. This can be done, but it’s more complicated.

The more complicated method is to lock a reservation slot upon beginning of the checkout process, with a time out occurring if the user takes too long to finish, or some other error occurs (in other systems this can be a blacklisted credit card number). If this happens, the system throws the reservation slot back into the pool. However, you need to give people a mechanism to keep trying for ones that get thrown back into the pool (like a “Try Again” button).

Building something like this not impossible (see Ticketmaster) but requires a much more real-time system that is aware of who has what, and what stage of the checkout process they’re in - in addition to total available inventory. Building a robust system like this is not cheap.

Even then, you might get shut out. You submit your party size, everything is already gone, and you never get to the calendar page. It just moves up the “sold out” disappointment to earlier in the process.

A subsequent commenter suggests using “Web 2.0” technologies (I think he’s talking specifically about Ajax) but as Anonymous suggests, that would increase the complexity of the system on the server side (unnecessarily in my mind) while moving up the “‘sold out’ disappointment to earlier in the process”. Plus, that sort of system could put you “on hold” for several minutes while the reservations are taken by the folks in front of you until you’re told, “too bad, all gone”. I’m not sure that’s preferable to being told sooner and may result in much more irritation on the part of potential diners.

In my opinion (as a web developer and as someone who has used Ko’s reservation system from start to finish), Ko’s system does it right. You’re locked into a reservation by the system only when you’ve chosen exactly what you want. It favors the web user who’s prepared & lucky and is simple for Ko to implement and maintain. That the logic used to produce this simple system takes three paragraphs to explain to an end user is irrelevent. After all, a restaurant dinner is easy to eat but explaining how it came to be that way fills entirebooks.

This might seem too inside baseball for most readers — the number of people interested in new NYC restaurants *and* web development is likely quite small, even among kottke.org’s readership — but there’s an interesting conflict going on here between technology and customer service. What kind of a problem is this…technological or social? Bruni’s correspondent blamed the technology and much of the focus of the discussion has been on the process of procuring a reservation. But the main limiting factor is the enormous demand for seats; tens of thousands of people a week vying for a few hundred seats per week. The technology is largely irrelevent; whatever Ko does, however well the reservation system works or doesn’t work, nearly all of the people interacting with the restaurant are going to be disappointed that they didn’t get in.

Pitchfork: The Pitchfork review of Hail to the Thief put forth the idea that “anything Radiohead does from here on out will sound like Radiohead”…

CG: That’s like a late-night stoner comment. At about three in the morning — after you’ve put on Captain Beefheart and you put the red scarf over the light bulb — it makes a lot of sense. But the next morning you’re like, “I don’t know, maybe the world is fucked and we didn’t solve it.” So I don’t know about that.

Sounds like he’s got Pitchfork figured out. And as your musical sommelier, I’d recommend the 2007 In Rainbows with this interview.

Kevin Kelly says that people whose fields have been Turing’d — outsourced in some way to computers — are in general more receptive to then adopting other potentially disruptive technologies.

We have this long list of tasks and occupations that we humans believe only humans can do. Used to be things like using tools, language, painting, playing chess. Now, one by one they get Turing’d. A computer beats them. Does it better.

So far we’ve can check off arithmetic, spelling, flying planes, playing chess, wiring chips, scheduling tasks, welding, etc. All have been Turing’d.

Computer scientists are great to work with, because in general they are completely fearless. They were Turing’d long ago. They grok that many of the tasks they used to do can be done much better by computers. On the other hand, doctors as a rule are loathed to accept new technology because what they do is hard to delegate to computers. Ditto for a lot of biologists.

The brain has a limited capacity for self-regulation, so exerting willpower in one area often leads to backsliding in others. The good news, however, is that practice increases willpower capacity, so that in the long run, buying less now may improve our ability to achieve future goals — like losing those 10 pounds we gained when we weren’t out shopping.

I sometimes say “muscles” so that the ‘c’ has a ‘k’ sound (the same way the cartoon character Popeye says it), computor instead of “computer” (after Ned Beatty’s exaggerated pronunciation of “Mr Luthor” in the Superman movies), and I occasionally say benimber instead of “remember” because it was something my cousin Paul said more than 20 years ago.

I use several of these mispronunciations regularly, which drives Meg nuts. Nucular, saxamaphone, muscles with Popeye’s hard c, computor, robit for robot, etc. Those of you who speak other languages…is this a common behavior outside of English?

Update:Language Log found a 1932 article about Intentional Mispronunciations. From a summary of the article:

Speaking of the Yankees, Derek Jeter always seems to get a lot of credit for those four World Series victories in five years but a quick look at the OBP stats for those years shows that Bernie Williams was the engine driving that offense. Jeter’s a little overrated maybe?

I tacked this specimen of Estupido Espezial!!! to my wall, where it immediately became a litmus test for visitors. Most people would say nothing, but woe be unto anyone who admired the thing in earnest: “hey, cool font!” would immediately land any visitor on the Suspicious Persons list. The best were those who would stare for a moment with bafflement before bursting out laughing, a few of whom became good friends, good clients, or both.

Are you as bored with my health as I am? I underwent a third surgery in January, this one in Houston, and once again there were complications. I am sorry to say that my ability to speak was not restored. That would require another surgery. But I still have all my other abilities, including the love of viewing movies and writing about them.

As you can see in the image to the right, the Shield of the Royal Arms has been given a contemporary treatment and its whole has been cleverly split among all six denominations from the 1p to the 50p, with the £1 coin displaying the heraldic element in its entirety. This is the first time that a single design has been used across a range of United Kingdom coins.

This is my favorite bit of design so far this year. (via we made this)

Update:Jonathan Hoefler compares the new UK coins, designed by a first-time currency designer, to the new US five dollar bill.

Below, the new five dollar bill, introduced last month by the United States Department of the Treasury. The new design, which features a big purple Helvetica five, is the work of a 147-year-old government agency called the United States Bureau of Engraving and Printing. It employs 2,500 people, and has an annual budget of $525,000,000.

It looks like Purple Modernistan is invading the US from the southeast.

Two Danish filmmakers, Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg in 1995 responded to what they saw as the increasing inhumanity and formulaic commerciality of effects-heavy, franchise-friendly feature films. They created a vow of chastity that placed the stylistic presentation and formal tricks of film subservient to the narrative and characterisation.

WebDogme is an attempt to outline a similar approach for the web. kottke.org is doing pretty well on the rules…I’ve unwittingly followed 5 or 6 of them at least. I’d link to the original Dogme 95 manifesto, but the official web site does not adhere to WebDogme rule #3 (“The browser must not be violated”); the manifesto is hidden within a frame. (via preoccupations)

Ooh, there’s going to be a Dr. Mario game available for the Wii at some point, playable over the network. It’s already downloadable via WiiWare in Japan…which should not be confused with the Virtual Console downloadable games even though the difference is really confusing.

In terms of the social environment, almost anything goes. Outside has a vast network of guilds, many of its players are active participants in designing the game’s social environment, and almost any player will be able to find company to undertake their desired group quests. On the other hand, gold-buying is rife, the outskirts of virtually every city zone in the game are completely overrun by farmers, and the developers have so far proven themselves reluctant to answer petitions, intervene in inter-player disputes, or nerf broken skills and abilities. Indeed this reviewer will go so far as to say that the developers are absent from the game entirely, and have left it to its own devices. Fortunately, server uptime has been 100% from day 1, despite there being only one server for literally billions of players.

Male to female transsexual. This is a manufactured vagina. A Neovagina.

This is genital origami, the cock cut open, carved and folded, crafted by techniques with names like Penile Inversion, the Suporn Technique, and the Wilson Method. The head of the cock morphs into the neoclit. In some methods the scrotal skin becomes the neovaginal canal.

I don’t know which methods were used in the creation of this particular neovagina, but surely this is art of the highest caliber. Sculpture in flesh tissue and nerve bundles.

Sizemore looks at Roberton’s weight-loss diet shakes, his Liberian diamond-mining operation, African gold-mining operation, his Cayman Island for-profit corporation, and his role in the US attorney appointments scandal. In short, Sizemore doesn’t find much to like about the man.

And here’s a fun little snippet about how they were planning for the broadcast of the second coming of Jesus:

We even discussed how Jesus’ radiance might be too bright for the cameras and how we would have to make adjustments for that problem. Can you imagine telling Jesus, ‘Hey, Lord, please tone down your luminosity; we’re having a problem with contrast. You’re causing the picture to flare.’

Arabs are part of an ethnic group, not a religion. Arabs were around long before Islam, and there have been (and still are) Arab Christians and Arab Jews. In general, you’re an Arab if you 1) are of Arab descent (blood), or 2) speak the main Arab language (Arabic).

A companion list of what every resident of the Middle East should know about the US might also be helpful. (via chris glass)

Clothing libraries loan clothes out for free (or a small fee) to unemployed people for job interviews or to expecting mothers so they don’t have to buy a whole bunch of maternity clothes. Great idea. (via magnetbox)

More than half the time, or in 5,295 baseball universes, the record for the longest hitting streak exceeded 53 games. Two-thirds of the time, the best streak was between 50 and 64 games.

In other words, streaks of 56 games or longer are not at all an unusual occurrence. Forty-two percent of the simulated baseball histories have a streak of DiMaggio’s length or longer. You shouldn’t be too surprised that someone, at some time in the history of the game, accomplished what DiMaggio did.

I think there are probably some cumulative effects that are being ignored here though, like increasing media pressure/distraction, opponents trying particularly hard for an out as the streak continues, pitchers more likely to pitch around them, or even the streaking player getting super-confident. The first game in a streak and the 50th game in a streak are, as they say, completely different ball games.